Which Language for Learning?

Should young children be taught in the language they speak at home, or in the national or international language they will need later in life? Advocates of mother-tongue instruction point to research suggesting that children learn to read most easily in a language they already understand. Learning to decode letters is hard enough, they argue, without also having to guess what the words mean. Once children can read well in their first language, the skill transfers, and a second language can be added more successfully. Critics do not usually dispute this research. Their objections are practical. In a country with well over a hundred languages, many classrooms contain children who speak several different home languages, and textbooks, trained teachers, and even agreed spellings may not exist for smaller languages. Parents, too, sometimes resist, fearing that time spent in the mother tongue is time taken away from English, which they see as the key to jobs. The debate, then, is less about what is ideal than about what is achievable. A policy that works well in a linguistically uniform province may fail in a city where a single class speaks five languages.